Yay more self-harm gimmickry.
Personally I wanted to vomit the day the Guardians were released, so I’m doing no jumps for joy.
I never liked Sacrifice a lot, and Loyalty could certainly see a small tweak like adding Enchant or Cleanse on all allies to be a better support. Honor as well could see a small improvement, maybe reducing the armor gain and giving Barrier on all allies…
As they stand right now the Guardians are subpar because the trolls are far better at spawning gems, triggering traits looping spell. Their “reign” was very short and centered on Courage and Justice.
And i’m not sold on the use of monocolored teams with Guardians, GW troop’s rewards and maybe the Imps, but i haven’t tested it extensively…
2 Likes
I’ve wanted to make Sacrifice work because I’ve always had an obsession with Black Beast and I see Sacrifice as a bizarre, yet unique extension of that play style. I love teams which create power disparities and I think Sacrifice has huge potential, but the roster of existing Troops can’t support that atm.
I’m somewhat of the opposite. I don’t like playing around with losing active troops- a team of 3, even when buffed, has a greater challenge filling itself than a team of 4, and clearing out a space for the summoner, the sacrificer, and the fodder leaves very little room to build around.
However, Sacrifice himself is still the highest power magic buffer, by a long shot- even though I dislike his ally-slaying, nothing else compares to those sweet sweet +11 magic buffs.
I have noticed recently released troops skirting with somewhat bigger magic buffs - Asha, Worldbreaker, Nax and formerly Fizzbang, as well as Scorpius and Bard. It makes me think that a dedicated, 5+, targeted magic buff may be coming, which would serve to replace sacrifice quite nicely for my purposes.
1 Like
I think it is super important that we finally get more color spreads, but I’m not too keen on Erinyes design so far. Her Storm trait being for the color that she generates and her really really high start cost (and with no current “fast” giver for her troop type) is going to seriously mitigate her for any kind of general use purposes. This looks like kind of troop that is designed to be able to slowly claw out a comeback in certain situations, but also to find herself in more more of those situations in the first place by having a spell that would be essential to any build you’d bother putting her in and but being slow to start and dealing no damage. Weird choice to make the second universal purple converter also be a summoner first instead of just costing 10 mana with a minor effect, but at least its an entirely unexplored color synergy.
I think Quasist’s threat level is being underplayed as well. It has the potential to reduce a targets magic by 20, which, for many troops, effectively brings it out of the fight, and reducing a target’s attack by 20 makes those quasists able to take a lot more hits if you are in a knock down drag out fight. Its just… if you summon two of them, your team now contains three troops that don’t deal any guaranteed spell damage, meaning you better have a damn good self sustaining fourth purple troop that also does huge amounts of damage and hope their team doesn’t have spells to target it. There are very few that spring to mind that might work well with this, and none where I’d want to get to the point of two of my troops dying. If you don’t have enough spell damage to close out the battle, unless its a Guild Wars battle, nobody is going to hang around for 15 minutes while you actually finish a battle by pinging the enemy with skulls and stat lowers, at least not after the first couple times they slog through it. The same with the Sacrifice angle - there are only four spots on your team. If Erinyes summons two Quasits to be used with Sacrifice, that means your team is now Erinyes, Sacrifice, and two Quasists, meaning whatever plan you had has already failed miserably. Sacrificial Priest can make use of them if you want to whittle down the enemy team and cross your fingers, but a Black Beast would leave them both pretty mana starved if you got to this point.
Overall, I basically just don’t like the double summon and the inflated mana cost that comes with it. Quasist as a fodder meat shield that steals some of your mana to potentially fire off a crowd control immediately I can get behind, but there aren’t a whole lot of setups that can benefit from filling your team with two fodder troops on purpose. That being said, it would be amazing (possibly even borderline OP) if the red converter similarly designed like this (storm trait, summon two fodder) summoned Fire Bombs, mainly because you can get rid of them at will. I think for a similarly designed double summon that always summons the same troop to work and be fun to play with, even if still niche usage outside of their color synergies, it needs to summon troops that can either transform themselves or get rid of themselves.
Edit - Bullet points:
Would like to see one of the following:
- Change two summons to one summon, 12 or 13 mana cost
- Keep two summons, but summon something else that transforms or gets rid of itself after casting (or rework Quasist to transform or get rid of itself)
- Remove both summons, change to 10 mana, give another secondary effect
8 Likes
I’m casting about to find reasons to use the Troop and finding few. Perhaps meant to be used early on then fall off in utility and never be seen again after level 100? 
Yeah it’s looking a lot more like Erinnope in its current incarnation.
4 Likes
Not to be confused with Erin of Touhou.
Erin Erin, help me Erin.~
I don’t have a problem with the Quasits. Rather, I think it’s nice that it can act as chaff if things arent looking great. However, I wish it wasn’t more expensive in mana cost than Giant Spider. Kinda defeats the point/ makes it less viable.
As a base Epic that costs 14 mana? Having just done the level 1-50 run twice in the last month myself, I wouldn’t consider pulling this troop early a windfall. But like I said, the different colors is super important step for the game so that we can go through some much needed lateral movement with regards to team building. Though there is not a whole lot of either yellow or brown creating stuff that also does something else of value and uses purple to make it a commonly used synergy as of right now, especially at that abysmal starting cost, it opens the possibility for it in the future. I’ve got a few teams I’m already theorycrafting her into, but it basically ignores the double summon function, because I cant find any instance where that would be useful unless you want to start a 15 minute war of attrition on purpose. I just wish the double summon wasn’t dragging down the design by necessitating it having such a high cost in the first place. Mana cost doesn’t mean a while lot after the board mod spells start flying, but for troops intended to get the ball rolling, even that one mana cost different is massive especially on a converter since every move taken from a fresh board makes it harder and harder to find an opening.
2 Likes
I see your points. I don’t take this troop seriously much for the reasons you don’t. I think it fills in for future plans. Right now early game players love to play with Troops like this, as insanely inefficient as they may be. That’s the only reason I can even think to use it atm. Somewhere down the road I think it may go somewhere; I give the devs enough credit to believe this will go somewhere eventually. I think Firebomb along with this Troop lightly hints at a distant mechanical expansion?
Yeah, what this said.
I agree with Mithran also.
Its highly inefficient - either you’re not getting the summons’ value (such as it is) due to no room, or you summon them and are stuck charging up two commons before anything else you wanted purple mana for.
Giant Spider summons something that has no conflict whatsoever, by comparison.
Then we have OP-as-hell-still-love-it Krystenax who summons something that has amazing synergy with itself.
1 Like
And also has magic link and big.
Unfortunately, no – Skadi image seems to be missing from the game files as of now. (Where did that screenie come from?)
Do we know what is her magic?
between 3.2 updates
Her max Magic is 4.